MadBob

larastrap

An Array as User Interface

Generating forms and panels dynamically, from a parametric set of contextual informations defining if it must appear a text input or a numeric one, is not a new thing. But with Larastrap, I think I've reached a new level. Right now I'm working on a large

svelte

Mobile Input

Working on the MVP for a mobile-first web application, I had to review the interaction mode with forms. On the desktop you usually just hop from one field to the other, but on mobile I've found that many applications use to open a dedicated overlay each time a

strapi

Migrating Drupal to Strapi

After a few years of pain, I've finally resolved to move the website of a client from Drupal (one old instance merely survived to the migration from v7 to v8, but with a high cost in term of stability) to a Strapi + Astro setup. I'm still

svelte

Wiring Laravel and Svelte

I had the totally insane idea to assemble a simple project with Svelte, but in SPA mode using Laravel for the backend, and keeping all together in the same repository. Which seems to be the less popular setup, as I had to scavenge many websites and blogs and StackOverflow pages

hack

Instagrammable Hell

As I've spent a quantity of hours finding the right combination of PHP code to programmatically publish a video on my own account on Instagram, I write here some note for future myself and for people wandering online. I've used this PHP package, provided by Meta

javascript

Too Complex for a Form

I often use - and, sometime, abuse - dynamic tables as a design pattern: an HTML table with a button to add new rows, each row contains multiple inputs to define details of an entity, the whole set is submitted once on the server for persistency. I adopt this so

hack

DependaBob

I started to set up some tooling to verify security of applications I develop for my clients (you know: Cyber Resilience Act is coming...), and the first try has been to use the popular Dependabot to automatically and periodically check for known vulnerabilities in dependencies. But Dependabot is pretty specific

laravel

Eloquent: the Masquerade

I have to implement a Laravel application where many different types of "service" are handled. Different services may have different data. Different services have mostly all the same functionalities: have statuses, trigger notifications, and more in general are related to the same types of other entities (users, clients,

hack

Distorting the Web

Today I had to deal with a customization involving the change of the canonical link in some pages of a website, under certain conditions, due SEO requirements. The problem: the code of the website could not be modified, as it runs as a binary application quite difficult to modify and

larastrap

Reading Back a Template

In the last month I started to massively review the internals of Larastrap, in the aim to deliver a 1.0 release within the next weeks (just in time to celebrate the first 5000 downloads from Packagist). And I've began to implement a bizarre idea. In the usual

php

Silly Videos

On the homepage of the Larastrap project (already mentioned many times in this blog) I've just dropped a short introduction video. The audio track has been generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech - as I'm too lazy to record an actual voice track, and my spoken English

laravel

Squatting Namespaces

Recently I've been involved in an integration of SPID, the SSO system used by Italian public administrations. It is an extension of SAML (an OIDC implementation was supposed to exist, until mostly political issue raised during the deployment...), and the reference PHP implementation was built on top of

javascript

Acrobatic Chart Labels

The web designer of a client of mine has been bold enough to design a multiline, multistyle label for the legend of a chart. And, as charts (and legends) are generated using a commodity JS library, the issue has been to enforce such hardy design. Luckily for me, the JS

laravel

Password Hard Reset

As it happens quite often to enforce by code, in a Laravel application, a password reset for a user (e.g. when manually creating a new user from the administration panel, and the new password has to be choosen by the user himself), and every time I have to dive

laravel

Get Another Text

Years ago I had the questionable idea to ignore the native Laravel localization features and adopt the more supported Gettext way, involving tools to automatically extract strings from the code and populate files in a widely recognized format. It seems I lost my bet: the Laravel native format got more

javascript

Touch to Zoom

Working on a Linux t-shirts e-commerce, I added a simple "hover-to-zoom" feature on the main image displayed in each product's page (this one, for example): it is possible to just hover the mouse cursor to obtain a larger image, which moves accordingly to the mouse movements.

hack

Playing with Semantic SEO

I'm building a tool for Wikipedia trends analisys, and in the latest days I've introduced a feature intended - first of all - to myself. Here and there I've read about "Semantic SEO", which can be summarized in "Provide a semantic

fediverse

Automate Mobilizon

As I'm hacking a Mobilizon instance to push into the fediverse events fetched from different sources (e.g. the ticket selling platoforms popular in Italy, like VivaTicket), I have to put together some PHP script to automatically interact with the poorly documented Mobilizon API. Even for the first

laravel

Destroy the (Laravel) Environment

Context: I have a Laravel multi tenancy application, with different .env files loaded according the current accessed subdomain and containing many parameters (the database configuration for each instance, but also many other items). This works when you access the PHP application via web, and booting the app from scratch at

hack

Happiest Birthdays

On TrendingOnWiki there is a set of pages dedicated to the most relevant birthdays for each day, where "most relevant" is determined by the number of mentions each person has on Wikipedia. Those informations are extracted from Wikidata - more exactly from Semantic Builders, previously mentioned here, as

php

Face to Face

Finally, I've found at least one actual use for an AI-powered tool. Even if this particular use case is absolutely not a new one. On TrendingOnWiki - a website monitoring trending topics on Wikipedia - I use images took from Commons to enhance pages. Usually photos of people.

larastrap

Parametric Interface

I want to share the following recent experience for a little proud. In GASdotto - my main open source project - I heavily use Larastrap, my own library of Bootstrap5 components for Laravel Blade. Actually, Larastrap has been implemented in the first instance as a derivation of GASdotto's

hack

The Wikipedia Graph

I've spent the latest days playing around categories in Italian Wikipedia, in the aim to chart them and get a visualization of a semantic graph composed by more than 440K nodes. I've not reached any acceptable nor useful result, but it is worth to document what

laravel

Little Small Laravel Components

Tonight I had the good idea to profile (using this package, really suggested) Larastrap, my heavily opinionated library of Bootstrap components for Laravel. And I was surprised to find that most of the time was wasted in Illuminate\View\FileViewFinder::findInPaths() function. With a bit of investigation I landed on

laravel

Laravel Catch All Relationship

Sometimes you want a "catch all" relationship in your Laravel model. The most common case is the "admin" User able to access all entities of a given other model, with no explicit belongsToMany or hasMany relationships described in the database, while other Users can access only